Its the govt who decide who gets "honored". The monarch is pretty much just the person who makes the announcement. So, Hawking's "slap" was fairly squarely aimed at Blair and co.
Regarding who honors actually get dished out to, y'know the Darling brothers - Codemasters founders - got honored just recently? Its really not just celebs, musicians and sporty types.
British comic and political activist Mark Thomas ( http://www.markthomasinfo.com/ ) has been doing this kind of thing for years.
In 2000 (I think) he orchestrated a national "talent show" kind of competition where all entries had to be submitted as CCTV footage recovered from CCTV operators through measures under the Data Protection Act. Hilarious stuff:-)
The intended purpose of advertising is to influence the viewer's opinion, to create bias towards specific brands or products regardless of whether there be any basis in fact for such a bias.
The intended purpose of Wikipedia is to inform without opinion, without bias. (hey, I DID say "intended"!). To expose facts alone, un-colored by opinion.
To me it seems that this makes advertising on Wikipedia innappropriate.
Checking link targets and blocking images that conform to the standard ad unit sizes is definitely something that could help, yep. I used to run a proxy, long ago, that selected images based on filter-matching their source URI and would also select based on the dimensions matching common ad sizes. Replace the ad with a blank GIF of the same size and you're laughing.
I guess, if the ISPs were going to fiddle with your HTTP responses in such a way, your best bet would be to do the same.:-)
This is a major latent difference between Americans and the English I don't think "latent" was quite what you meant there.
Nor was "English".
In any case, your point is rather muddy. You describe Americans "worrying about" the actions of their government whilst the Brits "complain about implemention and effects". This would seem to amount to pretty much the same thing; I'm either concerned about what my government does and how it impacts upon me, or I'm not?
In terms of "illegitimacy" Americans have plenty to gripe about due to controversies over the last couple presidential elections, the erosion of personal liberties and unpopular actions in the middle east and a perceived tide of anti-American sentiment throughout much of the rest of the world. And so on and so forth.
Mind you, here in the UK we have a premier who wasn't elected into that role, the highest density of surveillance cameras per head, comparable and equally unpopular actions ongoing in the middle east and a government widely recognized under the moniker "Nanny State", etc.
Amen to that. Also, I hear where you're coming from regarding Amiga paint apps.
I'm mainly using PSP-X myself. The GUI is, at least, nicely consistent. The fact that PSP-X's scripting/macro system is all Python is very handy too if you happen to be a Python programmer;-)
I do find though that when aunts/uncles/grandparents want to do a little dabbling in image processing, PSP-7 is a very good bet. Not the most powerful beastie for sure, but the interface is relatively non-threatening and, in my experience, novices can pick it up fairly quickly and advance to a point where they can comfortably crop, retouch and color-balance their holiday snaps.
As a web developer I've been using Microsoft's own VirtualPC doodad which they provided - for free - with a working XP Pro image that had IE6 installed on it. Since you can't really run IE6 and 7 on the same machine this was useful. One IE on my real drive, the other in the virtual machine. The problem was, I really did not want to put IE7 on the real machine.
So anyway, I figured I'd just download IE7 on the virtualized XP Pro. Imagine my surprise when that copy of Windows, freshly downloaded from microsoft.com, failed to pass WGA validation!:-/
Tredosoft came to the rescue of course with their various clever ways of getting different versions of IE to play (moderately) nicely together, but it still wasn't ideal.
Now I guess I can get IE7 to work on that XP image.
Like probably every gamer who ever read something about haptic interfaces, I always wondered about gaming applications. Just recently, indie developer Frictional Games announced they're adding haptic controls to their great little first-person horror adventure "Penumbra".
The neat thing here is that Penumbra is an ideal title to use the technology with. Puzzle-solving in the game is mostly physics based and you use mouse gestures (of a sort) to interact with physics objects in the game's world. Simple example: point crosshair at a filing cabinet drawer, hold down mouse button, drag mouse backwards to pull open the drawer. There's more to it than that, and maybe its a bit gimmicky, but its pretty neat nonetheless and with a haptic controller so that you could gesture in three dimensions and get some sensation of the object your virtual "hand" was interacting with... well, I'd love to give it a try anyway.
Your point about the hype is well made. This game was hyped to all hell with hyperbole like "revolutionise the genre" and such being bandied around. I suspect that rather a lot of slashdotters (myself included) tend to immediately raise the review bar when something is hyped as hard as BioShock was.
In terms of answering your question of why some folks have complained about overly superlative reviews:
There are invisible walls everywhere, many of them extremely obvious.
There are a a multitude of doors that are locked but mysteriously unlock at precisely the moment that the current radio-message-from-an-NPC that you're listening to actually finishes.
Regards much vaunted "moral choice" aspect - do I harvest or rescue the little sisters? I have to say that after being locked into a windowed box and forced to watch an exposition of exactly how extremely tough the "big daddies" are, right at the start of the game, then being told by some random radio voice whom I have no reason to trust that "you need to kill big daddy and this small child he's protecting in order to take her "Adam", (which appears to mean basically drinking her blood) my response was to just avoid them completely. This produces, just before you try to exit a level, a preposterous peice of fourth-wall-exploding nonsense - a dialog box pops up and tells you "you haven't either rescued or harvested any little sisters on this level - you should go back and do this otherwise the game will be very difficult later on". I mean - seriously - this is what counts for great writing these days? You give me a situation where I appear to have a free choice on how I react to the events you put infront of me and then when I come to what appears to me to be the completely reasonable conclusion that screwing with "big daddy" is a lot of trouble for no recognizable value you tell me "no, you're not playing it right!". Give me a break!
Now, I'm not saying there aren't some worthy things about BioShock. Graphics are obviously fairly awesome, there's a good variety of equipment and environmental toys to play with, but on the whole I don't think it lives up to the hype.
It seems like a little bit of work is left to make it as completely automated as you would need to have it just "always work" Completely right, yes. The images in the video have been selected to show this technique in the best possible light. There's a great variety of images that'll really not work quite right with a completely automated treatment. Speaking from experience having implemented this last week.
That said, as pointed out in the paper there's plenty of room for a higher level of analysis over the top of the basic seam-carving procedure. The function used to calculate the energy of a given pixel is easily swapped out with any one of dozens of different approaches. A more user-friendly implementation could attempt seam-carving based on a number of different feature maps and work out which is likely to produce the least distortion for a given image.
Anyhow, cracking bit of work IMHO, with boatloads of potential applications.
A silly English expression. A "fireguard" here being a small, usually free-standing shield placed infront of an open fireplace to deflect sparks that might land on your rug/feet/cat etc. Though their exact construction varies, the material used in fireguards is generally something that can withstand prolonged exposure to an open fire at close proximity.
So, were your fireguard made of chocolate, it'd be ill fitted to its purpose.
A variation on the "chocolate fireguard" expression is "as much use as a chocolate teapot" which, obviously, works for similar reasons.
First, I agree with the intention of your post. Find 'em, patch 'em, try not to make any more.
However, I think meaning of the #3 quote you cite is that hackers find bugs in - say - V1.1 of the software by reverse engineering the patch for V1.2. Once done, they can continue to attack customers with V1.1 because they know that far from all customers are going to bother to patch at all.
I realise this appears to be an emotive issue for you but "I mean please I've seen better scripting on daytime soapies."... really now... this strikes of hyperbole to me.
Specifically which daytime soapies are we talking about here? If they're that much better than BSG then perhaps some of us would fancy taking a look at them.
How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?
One organization attempting to answer this question is the advertising service Project Wonderful. In their model, you buy slots of time when your ad will be displayed on a given site via a continuous, rolling auction. Traffic, cost per click, cost per impression - all those traditional metrics are pretty much removed from the equation. The value of an hours-worth of impressions on a given site is decided dynamically and re-evaluated continuously by the folks buying the ads.
Whether it'll be truly successful or not, who knows. Their mechanism does seem to address some of the significant failings of the traditional online advertising model though.
But what I'd like to know is how we're all going to be able to access these hundreds of Tbs of media from our ubiquitous home servers when we're out and about in our flying cars?
And although, ultimately, its a pain in the arse that they're there at all, when you get get down to the practical day-to-day business of writing/maintaining websites, some of those bugs turn out to be very handy in concocting freaky work-arounds for inconsistencies in the ways that browsers support (or don't support) the standards.
I'll leave the provision of an exhausitive list to somebody else, but suffice to say if you're looking for a sizeable seam of bugs-which-simultaneously-screw-you-over-and-help- you-out, then there can hardly be a better place to look than Internet Explorer 6.
How about Doom? Or is FPS a fad?:-P The first person shooter isn't a fad. Actually reading TFA before posting was a fad, but appears to have long since gone out of fashion.;-)
From the article...
...Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994)...
Their stats are inflated at least a tiny little bit by web developers like me who, while having a perfectly legal install on our main machine, downloaded the free "Windows XP with IE6" image that MS themselves made for use with VirtualPC (to aid site testing, since you can't easily have IE6 and 7 on the same machine).
Thing is... the copy of Windows XP on the image they provide doesn't pass the WGA check!
Slashdot Mirror
Its the govt who decide who gets "honored". The monarch is pretty much just the person who makes the announcement. So, Hawking's "slap" was fairly squarely aimed at Blair and co.
Regarding who honors actually get dished out to, y'know the Darling brothers - Codemasters founders - got honored just recently? Its really not just celebs, musicians and sporty types.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/06/18/codemasters-founders-honored-by-queen-of-england
British comic and political activist Mark Thomas ( http://www.markthomasinfo.com/ ) has been doing this kind of thing for years.
:-)
In 2000 (I think) he orchestrated a national "talent show" kind of competition where all entries had to be submitted as CCTV footage recovered from CCTV operators through measures under the Data Protection Act. Hilarious stuff
Alli
The intended purpose of advertising is to influence the viewer's opinion, to create bias towards specific brands or products regardless of whether there be any basis in fact for such a bias.
The intended purpose of Wikipedia is to inform without opinion, without bias. (hey, I DID say "intended"!). To expose facts alone, un-colored by opinion.
To me it seems that this makes advertising on Wikipedia innappropriate.
Alli
Checking link targets and blocking images that conform to the standard ad unit sizes is definitely something that could help, yep. I used to run a proxy, long ago, that selected images based on filter-matching their source URI and would also select based on the dimensions matching common ad sizes. Replace the ad with a blank GIF of the same size and you're laughing.
:-)
I guess, if the ISPs were going to fiddle with your HTTP responses in such a way, your best bet would be to do the same.
Not exactly, since they can modify your HTTP responses at will and detect every HTTP request, regardless of target host, they need not insert...
[img src=http://isp.com/ads/somead.jpg]
into the stream at all. They could instead insert...
[img src=http://thesiteyouwereonalready.com/randomappearingnumber.jpg]
and then sniff your subsequent requests for that specific URI. Not easy to block with a plain old regular expression unfortunately.
Alli
Have to admit, after that glowing slashvert, I'm tempted meself
Nor was "English".
In any case, your point is rather muddy. You describe Americans "worrying about" the actions of their government whilst the Brits "complain about implemention and effects". This would seem to amount to pretty much the same thing; I'm either concerned about what my government does and how it impacts upon me, or I'm not?
In terms of "illegitimacy" Americans have plenty to gripe about due to controversies over the last couple presidential elections, the erosion of personal liberties and unpopular actions in the middle east and a perceived tide of anti-American sentiment throughout much of the rest of the world. And so on and so forth.
Mind you, here in the UK we have a premier who wasn't elected into that role, the highest density of surveillance cameras per head, comparable and equally unpopular actions ongoing in the middle east and a government widely recognized under the moniker "Nanny State", etc.
Javascript's alignment notwithstanding, it is not implicated by TFA in this particular situation. This is about the evils of Flash.
Amen to that. Also, I hear where you're coming from regarding Amiga paint apps.
;-)
I'm mainly using PSP-X myself. The GUI is, at least, nicely consistent. The fact that PSP-X's scripting/macro system is all Python is very handy too if you happen to be a Python programmer
I do find though that when aunts/uncles/grandparents want to do a little dabbling in image processing, PSP-7 is a very good bet. Not the most powerful beastie for sure, but the interface is relatively non-threatening and, in my experience, novices can pick it up fairly quickly and advance to a point where they can comfortably crop, retouch and color-balance their holiday snaps.
Alli
As a web developer I've been using Microsoft's own VirtualPC doodad which they provided - for free - with a working XP Pro image that had IE6 installed on it. Since you can't really run IE6 and 7 on the same machine this was useful. One IE on my real drive, the other in the virtual machine. The problem was, I really did not want to put IE7 on the real machine.
:-/
So anyway, I figured I'd just download IE7 on the virtualized XP Pro. Imagine my surprise when that copy of Windows, freshly downloaded from microsoft.com, failed to pass WGA validation!
Tredosoft came to the rescue of course with their various clever ways of getting different versions of IE to play (moderately) nicely together, but it still wasn't ideal.
Now I guess I can get IE7 to work on that XP image.
Like probably every gamer who ever read something about haptic interfaces, I always wondered about gaming applications. Just recently, indie developer Frictional Games announced they're adding haptic controls to their great little first-person horror adventure "Penumbra".
The neat thing here is that Penumbra is an ideal title to use the technology with. Puzzle-solving in the game is mostly physics based and you use mouse gestures (of a sort) to interact with physics objects in the game's world. Simple example: point crosshair at a filing cabinet drawer, hold down mouse button, drag mouse backwards to pull open the drawer. There's more to it than that, and maybe its a bit gimmicky, but its pretty neat nonetheless and with a haptic controller so that you could gesture in three dimensions and get some sensation of the object your virtual "hand" was interacting with... well, I'd love to give it a try anyway.
Alli
Your point about the hype is well made. This game was hyped to all hell with hyperbole like "revolutionise the genre" and such being bandied around. I suspect that rather a lot of slashdotters (myself included) tend to immediately raise the review bar when something is hyped as hard as BioShock was.
In terms of answering your question of why some folks have complained about overly superlative reviews:
There are invisible walls everywhere, many of them extremely obvious.
There are a a multitude of doors that are locked but mysteriously unlock at precisely the moment that the current radio-message-from-an-NPC that you're listening to actually finishes.
Regards much vaunted "moral choice" aspect - do I harvest or rescue the little sisters? I have to say that after being locked into a windowed box and forced to watch an exposition of exactly how extremely tough the "big daddies" are, right at the start of the game, then being told by some random radio voice whom I have no reason to trust that "you need to kill big daddy and this small child he's protecting in order to take her "Adam", (which appears to mean basically drinking her blood) my response was to just avoid them completely. This produces, just before you try to exit a level, a preposterous peice of fourth-wall-exploding nonsense - a dialog box pops up and tells you "you haven't either rescued or harvested any little sisters on this level - you should go back and do this otherwise the game will be very difficult later on". I mean - seriously - this is what counts for great writing these days? You give me a situation where I appear to have a free choice on how I react to the events you put infront of me and then when I come to what appears to me to be the completely reasonable conclusion that screwing with "big daddy" is a lot of trouble for no recognizable value you tell me "no, you're not playing it right!". Give me a break!
Now, I'm not saying there aren't some worthy things about BioShock. Graphics are obviously fairly awesome, there's a good variety of equipment and environmental toys to play with, but on the whole I don't think it lives up to the hype.
That said, as pointed out in the paper there's plenty of room for a higher level of analysis over the top of the basic seam-carving procedure. The function used to calculate the energy of a given pixel is easily swapped out with any one of dozens of different approaches. A more user-friendly implementation could attempt seam-carving based on a number of different feature maps and work out which is likely to produce the least distortion for a given image.
Anyhow, cracking bit of work IMHO, with boatloads of potential applications.
Alli
A silly English expression. A "fireguard" here being a small, usually free-standing shield placed infront of an open fireplace to deflect sparks that might land on your rug/feet/cat etc. Though their exact construction varies, the material used in fireguards is generally something that can withstand prolonged exposure to an open fire at close proximity.
So, were your fireguard made of chocolate, it'd be ill fitted to its purpose.
A variation on the "chocolate fireguard" expression is "as much use as a chocolate teapot" which, obviously, works for similar reasons.
Alli
Took off?
Just because I downloaded the thing doesn't mean I'm going to switch to using it seriously.
Maybe I just wanted a giggle!
First, I agree with the intention of your post. Find 'em, patch 'em, try not to make any more.
However, I think meaning of the #3 quote you cite is that hackers find bugs in - say - V1.1 of the software by reverse engineering the patch for V1.2. Once done, they can continue to attack customers with V1.1 because they know that far from all customers are going to bother to patch at all.
Alli
I realise this appears to be an emotive issue for you but "I mean please I've seen better scripting on daytime soapies."... really now... this strikes of hyperbole to me.
Specifically which daytime soapies are we talking about here? If they're that much better than BSG then perhaps some of us would fancy taking a look at them.
Alli
How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?
One organization attempting to answer this question is the advertising service Project Wonderful. In their model, you buy slots of time when your ad will be displayed on a given site via a continuous, rolling auction. Traffic, cost per click, cost per impression - all those traditional metrics are pretty much removed from the equation. The value of an hours-worth of impressions on a given site is decided dynamically and re-evaluated continuously by the folks buying the ads.
Whether it'll be truly successful or not, who knows. Their mechanism does seem to address some of the significant failings of the traditional online advertising model though.
But what I'd like to know is how we're all going to be able to access these hundreds of Tbs of media from our ubiquitous home servers when we're out and about in our flying cars?
And although, ultimately, its a pain in the arse that they're there at all, when you get get down to the practical day-to-day business of writing/maintaining websites, some of those bugs turn out to be very handy in concocting freaky work-arounds for inconsistencies in the ways that browsers support (or don't support) the standards.
- you-out, then there can hardly be a better place to look than Internet Explorer 6.
I'll leave the provision of an exhausitive list to somebody else, but suffice to say if you're looking for a sizeable seam of bugs-which-simultaneously-screw-you-over-and-help
From the article...
...Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994)...Is that impossible to do without DRM?
Programming websites that let you actually view a page without requiring a cookie is obviously hard for the folks at Salon.
Their stats are inflated at least a tiny little bit by web developers like me who, while having a perfectly legal install on our main machine, downloaded the free "Windows XP with IE6" image that MS themselves made for use with VirtualPC (to aid site testing, since you can't easily have IE6 and 7 on the same machine).
Thing is... the copy of Windows XP on the image they provide doesn't pass the WGA check!
A quick check on the YouTube for videos tagged as educational or regarding education returns 16000 items.
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=education
Are there more than 16000 items relating to vandalism and abuse of teaching staff? I think not.
Clearly, the NASUWT spokesman was not a maths teacher.
Alli